Strategic Intent Undermines Creative Outcomes: Evidence from a Randomised Control Trial

Chetan Walia
Additional contact information
Chetan Walia: University of Bradford

Chapter Chapter 6 in Creativity and Strategy, 2021, pp 91-112 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Established firms formulate strategies to gain competitive advantage, to maximise their rent or to innovate to solve problems. This study develops a framework for exploring the implications of these strategic intents for creativity and value creation. The sample of the randomised control trial in this study included 32 strategic decision makers from four established companies that generated 128 decisions for analysis by playing a negotiation game. All subjects received 1 day of prior training in negotiation skills. Those in the control group were permitted to follow their default instincts during the trial. We found that actors who were guided by the intent of competitive advantage tended to be non-explorative about other problems. Actors who were guided by the intent of maximising rent tended to be exploitative or negatively creative. Actors who were guided by the intent of problem discovery found the most non-obvious and creative solutions leading to greater value creation than other intents. The results were consistent with the prediction of our framework—that the default strategic decision-making intent would tend to be the one that is closest to maximising rent or securing competitive advantage, leads to the exploitation of other players and neutralises total value creation.

Keywords: Strategy; Creativity; Strategic decision-making; Value creation; Randomized control trial (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-70466-7_6

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030704667

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-70466-7_6

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().